What if everything your child enjoyed doing – lying in a hammock, building a fort, playing a video game or whatever it may be – was considered a form of school? This is one of the foundational ideas behind “unschooling,” a term coined in the 1970s by educator John Holt.

Essentially, unschooling is child-directed learning. The core theory is that all day long, kids are learning through their natural life experiences, including play, chores, reading and even watching YouTube videos. Parents or other adults can step in to facilitate an interest by providing more information, or help with complicated fundamentals such as reading or math, but the child takes the lead.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been brutal for most children, who found themselves at home in endless Zoom classes, often distracted and falling behind. Current data collected by the education thinktank Curriculum Associates revealed that by the end of the 2020/2021 academic year, students were behind five months in math and four months in reading.

A doomsday view of this data was put forth in a study by consulting firm McKinsey & Company. They predict students who experienced this learning loss may earn $49,000 to $61,000 less over their lifetime.

No matter how you parse the data, everyone can agree that much has been lost this year. But is there any upside? Have kids potentially gained anything from staying home and being left to their own devices for such long stretches of time?

The philosophy behind unschooling, or self-directed learning, offers some insights, and even a bit of hope.

“A year or two isn’t going to make a difference,” asserts Rachel Schinderman of Culver City, who took her son Ben, 14, out of traditional schooling entirely amid the pandemic. “Everyone keeps talking about how people will fall behind, but it’s such an arbitrary concept.”

Kids learn, even out of school

“Nothing is considered time wasting in unschooling,” says Cassie Clausen, founder of The Open School in Santa Ana, a K-12 self-directed school. “Everything has a purpose even if it’s just that you need a break or don’t know what to do next. Even if you’re engaged in something that the adult world finds frivolous like watching YouTube, etcetera – if the child is finding meaning, that’s worthy.”

A teacher by training, Clausen founded The Open School six years ago after finding herself dissatisfied with the traditional model of education. She was teaching at a college-prep, private high school, but she wasn’t seeing any of the “intrinsic motivation” she’d read about while getting her master’s in education and studying philosophers including Maria Montessori and John Dewey.

“We just kept pushing kids through this process. I was teaching Spanish. They’d come back for Spanish II and had only retained 10%. I felt we were doing the kids a disservice,” she says.

When she had kids of her own, Clausen was inspired to create a school that aligned with the tenets of unschooling, but would have an actual campus.

“I wanted to provide a space that was safe from this world of adult expectations and pressure. I want them to deep dive into things they’re interested in,” she says. “We have a constant anxiety about needing to do more, and we put that anxiety on our children.”

Trying something new

When schools closed in Los Angeles last spring, Schinderman decided to homeschool Ben. After some trial and error, she tried the unschooling approach.

“I’m quite the rule follower and fairly traditional, so this was difficult for me,” Schinderman says. “But you have to do what’s right for your own child and this is what was right for us. And I was really big on the philosophy this year that I didn’t care about algebra, for example – they can gain those skills later – I cared more about Ben’s level of happiness and family harmony.”

One interest of Ben’s that she followed was the TV show “Lost.” He binge-watched the show during the lockdown, so Schinderman checked out philosophy books and they discussed the philosophy behind the show.

She also found an alternative learning community in L.A. that opened its doors in January 2020, then had to move fully online a few months later. Alcove Learning, co-founded by Alexis Burgess, is also grounded in the philosophy of self-directed learning. Schinderman created and ran an online class for Alcove that taught kids about history through comedy.

“We’d watch clips on YouTube of Mel Brooks, for example, then talk about the Holocaust and World War II,” she explains.

Burgess was a philosophy professor at Stanford, then moved to L.A. for his wife’s job when he wasn’t offered tenure. After teaching at a few different L.A. colleges, Burgess says he started rethinking his academic values and began reading about education – “Creative Schools” by Ken Robinson was particularly influential – and talking to people at a homeschooling center in Atwater Village.

He thought about starting a school, but says he always got hung up on the curriculum question.

“The idea of allowing the kids to design their own educations was very appealing,” says Burgess, who founded Alcove Learning, in part, to try and bring college-style education to a younger audience. “So we’re less paternalistic toward our teenagers,” he adds.

Alcove began with three full-time students; Burgess says about 25 were signed up for fall, in part due to parents rethinking education during the pandemic.

Some of the classes offered virtually at Alcove this year were logic, photography, art, writing, programming and hardware, video editing, a math class in number theory and the history class taught by Schinderman. Many of these were requested by the students.

One of the unique aspects of Alcove is that classes only last as long as students remain interested, which Burgess says is typically around two or three months.

“There’s no artificial endpoint for a class at Alcove,” he says. “We just go until it’s not interesting.”

Learning the basics

Many parents worry that if they allow their children to direct their own learning, then they may never learn basics such as reading or math. Or they’ll fall behind and earn less and be less successful over their lifetimes.

Clausen says kids will learn these building blocks when they need them to move forward with their interests. For instance, her son loved “Minecraft” when he was about 5 or 6, and he needed to learn to write so he could communicate in the game, then be able to code.

Her daughter, on the other hand, was just curious about language as a puzzle to solve. Clausen says she would copy words over and over.

“Reading becomes a tool, a thing that they need to know how to do. It’s not about a value connection to it. You’re not labeled a good or bad reader. It’s just something you can do now,” says Clausen. “Not everyone’s brain is ready to learn certain skills at a certain age. That can do some damage.”

Kids might get interested in math if they want to measure out ingredients to make brownies, or by building with Legos. And there does need to be an adult to help facilitate learning and help kids get to the next level when they’re ready, Clausen acknowledges.

There isn’t a wealth of research on traditional instruction vs. self-directed learning (sometimes also called discovery learning), but many people are skeptical of the idea that kids will learn what they need to know on their own, particularly in the areas of science and math.

A 2004 study of 112 third and fourth graders in early science instruction, found that many more children learned better from direct instruction than from discovery learning.

A 1990 review of about 70 studies that examined math instruction produced a more nuanced outlook. The meta-analysis found that while higher-skilled learners can thrive with less guided instruction, lower-skilled learners tend to do better with more guidance and structure and showed a measurable learning loss without strong instructional support.

Another small 2017 study looked at students learning computer programming. The results revealed that higher skilled – or gifted and talented – learners did just fine learning on their own, but the lower-skilled students did poorly and “may benefit more from traditional education than self-directed learning.”

Clausen agrees it can be scary to make the leap to self-directed learning. “It’s hard sometimes because we’re all indoctrinated. We get scared if we’re messing them up and they won’t be productive members of society. It’s a life-long learning process as a parent of self-directed learning because you’re always coming up against how you were raised.”

What about tests?

Another red flag often raised when it comes to unschooling is the lack of testing or other objective assessments of progress. The Open School doesn’t give assessments or evaluations, and Clausen says it’s a misnomer to even refer to them as “objective” because all external assessments have an agenda and a bias.

“Adult-driven assessments inherently send the message to children that they are judged on a metric that they have no control over and don’t buy into. We do have the option for students to create a self-assessment transcript, but it is opt-in and usually only asked for when a student is matriculating. Even then, it’s not often necessary,” she says.

Clausen has had students leave The Open School for more traditional institutions, and says that when it’s the student’s choice, they have done well.

“For example, we have had students who decide that they would like to have a traditional high school experience, so they transfer to a conventional school at ninth grade. This was their decision. They undertook the work of identifying their knowledge gaps and studying those areas.” Clausen says. “I’m still in contact with the parents of those kids, and they tell me how they were so worried for their child’s transition, but that they are actually doing great and had no real issue making the switch. This is because they chose it.

“If a student is pulled out of our school by a fearful parent and put into a traditional school where they are taking the STAR test, but this wasn’t something they chose or find meaning in, they will fare about the same as any other student in a classroom who doesn’t find meaning in the exam.”

Unschooling – only for the privileged?

The pandemic has revealed the great disparity, once again, between the haves and have nots. The families who could afford to hire tutors or enroll their children in private schools, or even move them to second homes to escape surges of the virus, have fared much better than the kids struggling in Zoom classes at home while parents tried their best to help teach and also keep their jobs. Some parents had to quit their jobs altogether to stay home with kids.

A 2013 survey of 255 unschooling families, however, revealed that they “represented a wide range in terms of socioeconomic strata.” People often get creative with their work schedules to ensure a parent is home, or enroll kids in self-directed learning communities.

Burgess says Alcove, which operates on a pay-what-you-can model, wants to help families who can’t afford to have both parents stay home and unschool their kids, but he thinks under-resourced families also worry that they’re risking their kid’s future by taking a chance on an alternative form of schooling.

“But staying in school has its own set of risks; they’re just more familiar,” he says, listing problems such as mental health issues, inefficient education, learner apathy and a failure to foster executive function due to paternalism.

He added that the most interesting thing happening in the self-directed or unschooling space right now is unschooling communities of color cropping up in the interest of “decolonizing education” – a phrase Burgess first encountered in the work of Akilah Richards, a podcaster, author and unschooling mother of two in the Atlanta area, who “uses audio and written mediums to amplify the ways that unschooling, in particular, is serving as healing grounds and liberation work for Black, Indigenous/Native and People of Color communities.”

Bright spots from the lockdown

While some unschooling practitioners, including Richards, see it as a tool of liberation from systems that have been historically exclusive, some parents have simply noticed the way school can sometimes hinder kids’ natural inclination to learn.

Clausen says that during the lockdown parents would see their kids getting into really interesting projects then they’d have to get on Zoom and it would be interrupted.

“They’d be building a big thing with Legos and learning more math doing that than in class, then they’d have to stop and listen to a 45-minute lecture,” she says. “The school was interfering with learning. It was kind of a wakeup call for parents.”

Some parents and teachers also saw shy kids blossom in a virtual setting, an unexpected benefit of online classes and other types of communication, such as texting.

Raquel Casey says her daughter Claire, 13, who attends the Open School, was meeting and connecting with kids she typically didn’t while attending in-person school because she had to participate in – and sometimes create – new online events. “I noticed her being more vocal and speaking up more online. Usually, she is one to hang out in the back.”

Clausen noticed this in other kids too, and says she often saw different sides of kids, particularly on the text-based communication platform, Discord.

“It gave them this other way of communicating and some of them opened up and built deep relationships this way. It allowed for different social styles,” says Clausen. “The kids who aren’t as easy to see and are in the background really got a chance to flourish.

“I also think a positive is how it slowed families down. I’ve seen people reevaluating their priorities. Do we need three sports, and something happening every weekend? I’m a big advocate for unscheduled time when things can blossom. I’ve seen that as a huge benefit during the pandemic.”